The question of data retention

so Sweden finally sold out its soul to the EU and is asking ISPs to implement data retention. "But it's for your own good" we are told, it is for the security of your family and yourself in order to catch .

The EU also claims that there is no way of going back from the fuck-up created in 2006 when the data retention law was put in place for EU members. Well, the last time we looked out of the window there were no red heads burnt alive, no Negroes were barred from sitting besides us in a bar and women were not disallowed to vote.

At some point in the future achievements like these might be reverted again - when it has become clear that all the stored data got lost to various factions that dwell on the internet, making use of it in many different ways, e.g.:

leaking and selling data sets to advertisers by corrupt employees

stealing and publishing data sets on the Internet by hacktivists

data retention laws dishonoring corrupt government agencies or companies passing on your data to other countries that give a shit about local laws

foreign countries having an interest in acquiring such knowledge with data sets full of useful demographic data

If not we have to find ways to work around the old farts that write and put such laws in place without understanding the immense risk that is created by collecting all this data. Having said that, you do not have to fear that IPredator will engage in tracking you. We always made it perfectly clear that we do not tolerate serious crime and will comply with the local laws. But logging everything our users do goes way beyond what we can support from an ethical point of view.

The worst case scenario we can think of currently is that we need to move our operations to another country. Although the list of countries refusing to put data retention in place is getting shorter in the EU (and also worldwide).

Due to the massive distribution and versatility of the Internet it is not that easy to create an Alternet that will enable you to access to the resources you desire. Consider this ever shrinking list of countries that provide proper Internet access as a reason to spend some time to develop new mechanisms to cope with the current changes. Go help Tor, I2P or similar projects since we will need them more than ever in the future.